After Des Vivants, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade wants to make a fiction film

The director of Sambre and Laëtitia plans to put the world aside for a moment: “Perhaps with Des Vivants, I explored reality to the end.”

Oscar for best documentary in 2002 for An Ideal Guilty, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade has become, in twenty years, one of the major voices in French criminal storytelling. A trained documentary filmmaker, he has shaped a unique filmography by adapting news items that have marked opinion on the small screen. From Laëtitia to Games of Power, via Sambre and today with Des Vivants, the director has managed to capture reality like rarely.

An obsession, moreover, assumed. In 2024, at the time of Sambre’s promotion, he told us bluntly that he did not want to imagine a thriller, that he did not want to invent a news story to create fiction: “No. I wouldn’t know how to do it. And then there are too many stories that reality gives us. They have a unique talent that we must use.”

With him, everything had to start from the field, from the archives, from testimonies, as in Des Vivants. But the France 2 series – built on testimonies from survivors of the November 13 attacks – visibly acted as a pivotal stage in his career. Today, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade plans to write fiction. He confesses to us:

“It’s not easy to move on after such a strong subject (like The Living). But I still have in mind a project that would start from a totally original story. It would be more for a film… But I’m only at the very beginning of the project.”

It should be noted that Jean-Xavier de Lestrade had already signed a feature-length fiction film, in 2008, before starting the series: On your enemy cheek, carried by Robinson Stévenin, followed the reintegration of a young man after 13 years in prison, but had not met with success.

We don’t yet know what this new film the director is working on would be about, but he seems determined to put reality aside, at least for a moment: “Perhaps with Des Vivants, I explored reality to the end. Even if the work with the actors was truly fascinating… I don’t know if we could go that far in a pure fiction. But I still want to experiment!”

After two decades of x-raying the world as it is, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade wants to imagine another. And it will definitely be an event.